3. Make a great video

4. Thoughtful rewards

Believe it or not, some Kickstarter projects don't have any rewards! Good, varied, rewards for donors go a long way toward making a project successful.

Those points come courtesy of Kris Rush and her wonderful article, Getting Rid of the Middle Man. Kris writes that even if you don't already have a tribe/community you can still do a Kickstarter project. She writes:

[I]f you have a fan base, you’re better off than the folks who are
starting from scratch. But I just watched the Bijou raise funds from all
over the world, not because of the theater’s fan base, but because small theaters in general have a fan base.

Different Kinds Of Crowdfunding

So far I've just talked about Kickstarter, but there are many different ways to crowdsource a project.

For instance, Kris writes that a number of novelists are serializing their books online. They fund the project by placing a donate button at the end of very chapter.

Kris recommends, and I think this is an excellent idea, that you finish your book before you serialize it "just in case something in your
life goes awry or you have to go back and add a gun in chapter one so
that you can shoot that gun in chapter fifteen. (Getting Rid of the Middle Man)"

Yep, been there, done that.

Why Try Crowdfunding?

Crowdfunding, or crowdsourcing, allows writers to cut out the middle man.

Kris writes:

I’ve mentioned before how I appreciate the loss of the middle man.
But this week truly showed me on a deep level what kind of world we’d
live in if crowdsourcing hadn’t gone mainstream. ...

First, that royalty statement. It is missing both some information
and some promised money—money the publisher has owed me ... since early last year. ...

As Dean said as he shook his head over yet another royalty fight
facing me, the third this year, “It’s a wonder anyone survives in
traditional publishing any more.”

I certainly wouldn’t be earning a living at it—a reasonable,
above-poverty rate living—any more. In the last few years, I earned
about one-quarter of what I used to earn in my bad years. The advances
have gone from survivable to insulting. And now publishers are fudging
on royalties owed. It’s disgraceful and hard.

. . . .

But the next four e-mails were all from Kickstarter projects run by
full-time freelancers. From anthology projects to magazine startups to
calendars ...

... Sometimes I participate in a crowdsourced project because I like the people
involved, but mostly I do so because I think the project is
worthy—something I want in my library, I want to see, or I want to hang
on my wall.

None of these projects would have gotten funding through some arts
organization, nor would they have made it through the byzantine system
set up by the studios/publishers—ah, hell, let’s just call them suits.

And if the project had made it past the suits, then the artist who
proposed the project probably wouldn’t have made any money on it. Or the
artist wouldn’t have seen any money for years after the project got
released.

. . . .

It’s time for writers to explore all of their options. And many of those options should not
include middle men. The suits don’t care about midlist writers or
indie films or small movie theaters. They care about whatever bottom
line they see, and they don’t care how they reach that bottom line.

Should You Try Crowdfunding?

Crowdfunded projects aren't for everyone. They're stressful even for those folks who don't have trouble meeting their goals, folks like Kris Rusch and her husband Dean Wesley Smith with their project Fiction River.

Beyond that, there are many other ways to get your work out to readers: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, even places like wattpad. I think it would be interesting to serialize a novel on Amazon. Publish one chapter a week and then, at the end, release the book.

It's great to know writers have options such as crowdfunding. We no longer need middle-men. Though it's always good to keep ones options open. (That said, I cringe at the thought of constantly having to fight publishers just to get paid the royalties owed me.)